Call centers employ agents who attend to incoming queries from customers. In order to timely service a customer, it is critical that the call traffic be handled appropriately. Given that most of these organizations are service-centric, it is important that they promptly attend to their customers.
Call centers may have one or more agents in various locations, and one or more Automatic Call Distributors (“ACDs”) in each of those locations to distribute incoming calls to agents. Often times, the number of calls exceed the call handling capacity of the call center. In such situations, many calls are kept on hold or in a queue so that they may be attended to as soon as suitable agents become available. However, if a call is assigned to a particular queue with large number of waiting calls, calls of an urgent nature may not get proper priority or the caller might just terminate the call out of frustration due to the lengthy wait time. This may lead to a loss of sales or customers or both.
There are different polling techniques to obtain queue status information to load balance inbound calls across a network of ACD systems. In accordance with one technique, namely “on-demand” polling, polling occurs whenever an inbound call needs to be routed to the best destination. In accordance with another technique, namely “scheduled” polling, polling occurs at periodic time intervals regardless of the arrival of incoming calls. In the scheduled polling technique, the status information is stored and used to direct calls to the best destination when a route request is received.
The status information includes information about the conditions within a queue or queues at the time the status poll was received. This information is then used to route calls to the best destination within the network. More specifically, the status information includes expected wait time (EWT) and weighted advance time (WAT). The EWT is the expected wait time for a new call, if it were to be placed in the call queue at this moment in time. WAT is the average time it takes a call to advance one position in that queue. WAT is useful in determining the consequences of queuing a new call to a queue or servicing a call from the queue.
In the scheduled polling technique, the status information is adjusted based on events and on elapsed time, in order to keep the stored data as accurate as possible between scheduled polls. For example, when a call is routed to the best destination, the EWT for that destination is increased by WAT to account for the additional call. Also every WAT seconds, EWT is decreased by WAT, to reflect the fact that calls are being serviced from queue between scheduled polls. However, in scheduled polling, polls are unnecessarily taken even when no call has arrived for a considerable period of time.
On-demand polling provides the most accurate routing, since calls are routed using the most up-to-date status information. However, on-demand polling is not practical in all-scenarios. First, on-demand polling is not fast enough when very rapid responses to route requests are required. Second on-demand polling is not efficient, because an excessive number of polls are issued when call volumes are very high.
Thus, an efficient and effective polling technique is required that provides accurate updated queue status information with an efficient utilization of resources.